Demons in the Dark
by Earthcat123
Summary: Sequel of "Twins" and "Same Old Story," featuring recurring OCs. The mysterious disappearance of the Wheeler family sends the Battle Force Five chasing shadows that lead them to an evil older than the Sentients themselves. Only by calling in some long-forgotten favours can the team hope to bring back Vert's family, but even then they might be too late.
1. Chapter 1

**Well, I feel like I've been gone way too long… Hey all, welcome to part three of this little adventure. As always reviews are more than welcome, even ones that tell me if I suck, so go right ahead. A couple of things you should know; A lot of this is told from OCs' points of view, so you might want to go read **_**Same Old Story **_**and **_**Twins**_** before getting all confused as to who Ronnie and Lucinda are, but beyond that you're good to go; just bear in mind that I'm a really bad uploader. So, I, Earthcat123, proudly present **_**Demons in the Dark.**_

_**CHAPTER ONE:**_

Subtlety had always been Ronnie's area of expertise, and Lucinda Demourney had that fact at the forefront of her mind as she sped forty over the limit across the desert. If Ronnie had been with her they would have timed it perfectly so as to reach Zeke's Diner just before closing time, stocked up on that delicious pie, and then carried on to the Spectra Motors garage to arrive at some ungodly hour of night.

If Ronnie had been with her, though, Lucinda would not have been driving out to Spectra at all. As it was, the sun was only just setting and she barely looked up as she passed the Diner's signature towering plastic pizza.

She found the hangar with ease and shifted the heavy surface door aside to reveal the dusty and neglected shop floor beneath, adrenaline and a strange sensation that she identified as genuine fear giving her body strength beyond what it normally contained. She looked about the garage, watching the atoms of dust play and dance in the streaming beams of the sun setting through the Western windows. She realised that she hadn't thought out this part of her plan. Find the Hub, get the team to help; that was about as much detail as she'd gone into. But she hadn't even found the Hub yet. It was below her, right under her feet; she could feel the energy that powered it humming gently through the soles of her boots, only present to those who knew to pay attention to it. How to get inside was something else entirely, a trick Ronnie had never revealed.

With a shrug she decided to just hope that someone was down there, and settled for the fool proof tactic of banging on the walls and screaming at the top of her lungs. Subtlety, after all, had always been Ronnie's area of expertise.

Satisfaction didn't even register when a panel of wall on the far side of the hangar slid sideways, revealing the elevator to the Battle Force Five's secret underground base. Secret underground base… despite everything, Lucinda allowed herself to grin at the notion.

She flipped the keys to her bike around her fingers impatiently as the cabin descended.

The light when she stepped out was dazzling compared to the shady darkness of the garage above, yet at first glance her terror mounted as she considered the possibility that no one else was around. The Team's oh-so-conspicuous vehicles were not in their usual parking spaces, and Sage the Glowing Blue Alien wasn't at her usual post before the holographic computer. The whole room, as vast and chasmic as it was, resonated with an emptiness that made her shiver. What if they weren't there anymore? What if Vert had moved on...?

"Oh, get a grip Lucinda," she muttered out loud, listening to her cold voice echo across and bounce off the walls in front of her. Of course they hadn't moved on. Even if they had managed to find somewhere else remotely suited to hiding a covert alien-hunting task force beneath its foundations, Vert would have had this place dismantled and the ground filled in, leaving no evidence at all of its existence. No, they were still here. And besides, someone had to have let her in just now.

Unless she was too late and they were already dead. She tried not to think about that in too much detail.

She looked around for any signs of life, and was hit some fifteen minutes later by one of those strong waves of emotion that causes a person to wonder how humans had ever managed to evolve whilst maintaining the ability to be so darn stupid; surely that should have been one of the first things to go in the whole survival-of-the-fittest thing. Because slap bang in front of her, looming like a sleeping bear, was the Gearslammer. Its blue-and-white paint job sort of blended in with the Hub wall behind, and it was so big that she had stupidly assumed it was part of the Hub's structural supports. Because heck, the whole thing was so alien to her she had no idea what was what anymore. But the Gearslammer gave her a sense that someone was somewhere around, and a grin somehow managed to spread itself back across her face.

"Hey, AJ!" she called into the air. Her voice rebounded back to her, shockingly loud in the still silence, and made her falter. For the most nerve-wracking of moments nothing answered her, and she wondered again if indeed she was too late in her arrival. And then the thunder of boots running on shiny tiled floor reached her from a corridor and two figures emerged into the light. One was AJ, the friendly Canadian she had thought so adorably gullible on her last visit. And the other was Zoom, cheery happy little Zoom, to whom she had taking a rather unhealthy liking. Actually he wasn't so little; they were the same age, and he was only half an inch shorter than she was. She supposed the phrase had stuck since she'd heard Tezz refer to him as such so often.

"Lucinda Demourney!" Zoom cheered, bounding over. Lucinda refrained herself from hugging him; it would have been inappropriate under the circumstances. "What brings you to our neck of the woods?"

"I need to talk to Vert and Tezz, like, right now," she blurted. Well, so much for the plan to be cool about the whole situation. "Seriously, the fate of the Multiverse or whatever isn't nearly as important as this."

"Every time you and I encounter one another, Lucinda, you seem incapable of grasping the seriousness of Battle Force Five's operations."

Lucinda cursed under her breath as Sage drifted around a corner and into her field of vision. The Sentient had never taken a liking to her, and for her part, the feeling was entirely mutual.

"Look, Sage," she pleaded, realising that out of the three available before her she was the one most qualified to help. "I know they're probably in the middle of restoring the balance of life or whatever it is they do, but this is so much more important than that."

She remembered Ronnie saying once that Sage didn't do emotion very well. From the death-defying glower she was getting, it would seem that her friend had been quite wrong.

"If you must know, they are conducting a rescue mission on Planet Vandal that requires the utmost delicacy..."

"What is it Luce?" Zoom cut her off by stepping in between them. "What's going on?"

"It's Ronnie," Lucinda confessed, and then sat heavily down on a table. "Look, Zoom, as soon as I try and explain this I'm gonna go crazy, so I'd really rather only have to do it once. Can you get Vert in here, Tezz too? Or just put me through to them on coms if it's that much of a problem."

It surprised Lucinda to see AJ amble over towards the computers before she had even finished speaking and begin tapping in commands. Sage turned her glare onto him.

"The Vandals don't have their technology anymore, Sage," he consoled her in that soothing voice of his. "The worst thing the guys have to worry about is the wildlife. Vert and Tezz can be spared if Zoom and I swap in for them."

With a harrumph so accurate to human expression that Lucinda was sure that she had been practicing, Sage floated off deeper into the Hub, positively emanating annoyance and leaving an awkward gap in the atmosphere of the room.

"Come again, AJ, I only got half of that," Vert's voice resonated from AJ's computer before Sage was even out the door.

"Sorry dude, but we have a little problem back here. Lucinda's just shown up wanting to talk to you and Tezz right away. She says it's about Ronnie, and she says it's important."

"We are currently in the midst of an extremely precise rescue attempt..."

"We'll be there in twenty seconds." Vert cut off Tezz's thick accent as if he had never spoken. "AJ, you and Zoom mount up and prepare to take our places; Agura will fill you in on the plan."

And that was it. In just three brief exchanges she was getting what she wanted. But Lucinda was fuming; she had always _known_ that Tezz's highest priority wasn't his relationship with Ronnie. She had never quite trusted the Russian, although until now she had had only her gut instinct for proof. Beside her, Zoom winked and tried to convince her to smile.

"It'll be okay," he whispered, and then ran off to his bike before she had a chance to answer. It wouldn't be; she had a gut instinct about that too.

When Zoom and AJ left her alone in the Hub she began to count down from twenty, just for amusement's sake and to try and prove that Vert wasn't as perfect as he was always made out to be. Halfway down, somewhere near nine or so, she realised just how much she disliked Ronnie's other friends. Not just the Battle Force Five, but everybody else she had known before moving to the city and had kept in contact with. Her friend Stacy from grade school who came up at some point or another during every vacation to whom Ronnie always gave free pizza if she paid for drinks and desert. Marty O'Neill, who she didn't even know but had a strange distrust towards nonetheless, and Tommy Saunders, who had actually been Lucinda's friend too before she and Ronnie had even met; she didn't talk to him anymore. She told herself that she was concerned that they would hurt her best friend, but as she sat there counting down from twenty she began to wonder if really it was because she was jealous that one day, her best friend would choose them over her. She resolved to be nicer to them all next time she saw them, and to not speak scornfully of them around Ronnie. If she ever saw Ronnie again, of course. Then she turned her thoughts to wondering why she was being so sentimental all of a sudden.

Vert pulled into the underground garage before her mental count had reached two.

"What's going on?" he demanded as he vaulted over the Sabre's body. "Where is she?"

Lucinda took a breath, but at her hesitation he carried on. "The two of you do everything together, where is she?"

"Alright, alright!" Anything was easier to say than the explanation for her impromptu visit. She faltered again as Tezz slowly climbed out of the Splitwire and joined Vert, moving with that easy grace that had always unnerved her.

"So, last Wednesday Ronnie and I were supposed to be going up to Arkansas for a show; we had to leave at, like, four in the morning or something, and we agreed to meet at the McDonald's by the highway for breakfast before heading off."

"Get to the point, Lucinda," Vert growled.

"I am. Look, you're going to want to know all this eventually so I may as well tell you now. So I was there at four, like we agreed, and I waited. And I waited some more, and then it got to four thirty and she still wasn't there, so I started to panic because Ronnie is never late for anything without giving out a heads up first. So I call her and she doesn't pick up, and this goes on for another twenty minutes until I run my phone credit right down, and we seriously need to be going, so I figure I'll go by the restaurant and just check if she forgot to set an alarm or something."

She stopped again and took a deep breath. She could feel the tears coming; she had so far managed to keep it together but she knew that as soon as she got to the important bit she would break. She just had to tell them as much as possible before that happened.

"When I got there… the whole place was empty. I didn't expect anyone to be in the restaurant, but then I went upstairs and there was just… no one there. But it wasn't like they'd upped and left in the night; it was like they'd just vanished. I looked around, and the TV was still on in the living room, Jeremy's desk light was on and Ronnie's bike was still in the garage. She doesn't go anywhere without that bike, she can't. If she had gone somewhere, she would have taken that at least, but nothing was out of place. Except… them."

Acutely aware that her voice was getting progressively squeakier as she went on, she stopped and tried to hide her face as best she could behind her hands while she regained her composure. When she looked up again through tear-stained eyes Vert's jaw was set in a terrifying square and Tezz was staring at him with a due mixture of concern and trepidation. He had taken a step away from him, too. Lucinda mentally slapped herself; this wasn't just about Ronnie for him. She'd forgotten that the people she was talking about were his whole family.

"You have a minute to tell me everything you know." His voice was low, as if he was threatening her with unlimited pain if she held anything back, and he pointedly kept his gaze on the floor. Lucinda swallowed.

"I... I called the police right away, and it's taken them until this morning to come to the conclusion that they have no idea what happened. Like I said, nothing has gone missing; nothing has changed from where it should have been. One of the officers kind of jokingly said it was like they'd been abducted by aliens, which is when I thought to come find you guys. If something like that had happened - and twenty months ago I sure as Hell wouldn't have believed it - then surely if anyone can find it you can, right?"

"Can you make an estimate as to when precisely this happened?" Tezz spoke up for the first time, distracting Lucinda's attention from Vert who was now pacing the Hub with an expression suggesting he wanted to kill someone.

"Well, their Mom always stops watching the TV at eleven thirty because she says there are never any good shows on after then, and Jeremy works at the Subway two blocks down now so he does his homework later at night... He tends to give up around eleven. And I left at half nine that night to go home, so it must have been between then and just before eleven. I've asked their neighbours, no one went in after they closed at ten. And they must have closed at ten, because the sign had switched over and the door was locked."

"So we have a window of less than an hour," Tezz muttered, stroking his chin as he went to the computer. "Sage, were you listening?"

"I was," the Sentient replied, making Lucinda jump; she had come in behind her without making a sound.

"Any theories?"

"None. I would need more data before coming to a conclusion; there are several species capable of doing this, but I would need atmospheric readings from the area in question before I could say assertively."

"Agura, what's your status?" Vert barked, slamming his hand down on a panel. The hunter's voice came back startled but nonetheless efficient.

"We have retrieved Tromp and are heading for the Kharamanos home world portal. ETA fifteen seconds."

"Change of plan, bring Tromp back to the Hub."

"Vert?"

"I said bring him here. I need him for something."

"Understood. We'll be right with you."

"Between you and Tromp, do you think there is enough knowledge to identify what happened to my family?" Vert's expression softened for Sage, but only slightly.

"There will be a greater sum of knowledge, yes," the Sentient confirmed. "But Vert, it is entirely possible that the cause of their disappearances is unknown to both our races."

"I know, I know. Programme a Battle Key for..."

"Hang on, hang on." Lucinda cut in. "You can't just open a glowing blue portal in a busy Downtown street. It's four in the afternoon; if somehow you don't cause a major traffic accident, your whole secret operation will be blown out of the sky."

Vert pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath, reminding her just how similar he and Ronnie actually were; she did that when she was stressed out too. There was silence in the Hub for an uncomfortable number of seconds. "Yeah, you're right. Okay, uh..."

"Vert," Tezz placed a hand on his shoulder. He said nothing for some time, bringing the tension in the room back down to a bearable level. "We will find them."

Lucinda frowned; it wasn't like Tezz to be anything other than bluntly realistic about any situation, so what did he know that she didn't? What had he worked out already from only what she had said?

"Yeah," Vert agreed, although the look in his eyes rather suggested that he didn't share Tezz's confidence.

Lucinda wondered how the Russian could be so calm when he had just been told that his girlfriend had disappeared off the face of the Earth with no trace left behind.

Their little tableau was broken up by the rest of the team emerging through the underground tunnels, and for the briefest of moments Lucinda could almost have convinced herself that nothing at all was wrong.

"I _hate_ that planet," Stanford cursed, storming out of the Reverb and pacing dramatically into the centre of the Hub. "Honestly, now that we've taken away their technology and rescued Tromp, please can we never go back there ever again?"

"You've made your point, Stanford," Spinner complained. "You never have to set foot on Planet Vandal again as long as you live."

He sounded like he had made that promise many times on the way home.

"Unless of course something else comes up," Sherman countered, all the makings of an evil grin emerging on his face. He crossed to the Reverb and reached in through the roof, and pulled out a small figure encased in a dirty metal shell with a single wheel at its base. Lucinda tried not to stare and failed catastrophically. Stanford squawked with rage and fumed in the direction of the rec area, but Vert stood in his way and put a hand on his chest to stop him before he had taken three paces. Stanford glared up defiantly, and then saw the look on his leader's face. In the unexpected silence everyone turned to watch Vert, and suddenly the atmosphere clouded over yet again.

"We have a problem," Vert stated matter-of-factly. "Stanford, Tezz, Sherman and I are going to drive to the city; do what you need to do to clean up quickly, we're leaving in twenty minutes."

"Vert, what's going on?" Agura stepped up to Vert with her arms open, the softness of her voice suggesting that she was prepared to have this conversation in private if he needed to. Vert looked around his team, meeting each eye, before glancing at Lucinda and turning away from them all.

"Sage will fill you in," he muttered, and left the Hub. Nobody spoke or moved until the doors had slid shut behind him.

Twenty minutes later Vert re-emerged. During that time Tezz and Sage had given the team a brief synopsis of Lucinda's story while she had gone and wiped the red smudges from her face, and she had come back to the Hub to find the alien called Tromp plugged in to the central computer. As in, literally, plugged in. A cord stretched from his midsection to the central support structure that Lucinda had never even considered was actually the computer's core. She had a feeling she was going to be seeing some very strange things before all this was over and done with.

Vert was significantly calmer when he joined them, and almost cracked a smile at their determination. "We'll take the Reverb and Splitwire," he informed them, "as they're our least conspicuous vehicles. Lucinda, you're coming too. Sage, we'll relay what information we can find back to you here, and see where that takes us. Are there any questions?"

Resounding silence and shaking heads met his question, and his eyes brightened.

"Then let's go."


	2. Chapter 2

**Hey, so since we're all busy at the moment, have another chapter. So here I shall be experimenting with flashbacks, and if all goes well I shall continue to do so through the remainder of the story. Let me know what you think, ~ E.C. xx**

Vert had never actually been to his mother's restaurant before. She had often talked about moving to the city, away from the barren nothingness of Handler Corners, and opening up a pizza establishment that would rival Zeke's in quality and custom. She had given his father six months to re-appear from his accidental trip across the Multiverse, but as soon as that time was up she had wasted no time in packing up and going; the summer after Vert finished High School she bought a three-storey house on the main street and moved in. Ronnie and Jeremy went with her, but Vert couldn't leave Handler's behind. He had never been satisfied with the story of his father's disappearance, had always held on to some hope that he was still out there somewhere. He knew that if Jack did return, the garage would be the first place he would go. Someone needed to stay there to meet him.

Of course, that same summer had been the one in which he had come across his first Storm Shock portal, and from then on his entire life had been turned upside down. He had given up his family for his new friends, and he had been fine with that. Until now. Now he regretted it enormously. He regretted it because when he stepped through the back door into the restaurant everything he saw reminded him of his mother, and he realised just how much he had actually missed them.

Sherman and Stanford looked around the ground floor, scanning for various things at Sage's direction. Tezz ran straight upstairs, closely followed by Lucinda. He had a scanner in his hand but Vert knew he wasn't going to use it. He had to keep reminding himself that this was just as hard for Tezz as it was for him, although for vastly different reasons. Vert frowned; he had never quite gotten used to the idea of one of his friends dating his sister, even if they did only see each other once a month or so.

"What've we got?" he asked Sherman, trying to direct his thoughts in a more useful direction.

"At the moment, nothing out of the ordinary." Sherman squinted to read the display of his scanner in the dying light. "But if your folks were upstairs at the time, we should probably look there."

Vert nodded and led the way up the stairs. The landing opened out into a spacious living area adorned with IKEA furniture that was stylishly mal-coordinated where colour was concerned. Vert couldn't help but smile; the same thing had happened in their house back home.

"Hold on, I've got something," Stanford muttered. He moved blindly around the room, bumping into every obstacle he could reach as he followed his scanner to the most sensitive spot. "Sage, are you getting this? Because I have no idea what it means..."

"I am receiving your data, stand by."

Vert left his communicator open and strolled through the rooms, sensing his family's presence in all of them. The middle floor held only the kitchen and a small room seemingly dedicated to a plethora of beanbags and his little brother's Xbox, so he took the stairs up again to the third floor. He glanced into Jeremy's room - plastered with movie posters and football flags as every young teen's should be. The desk light was still on; Vert clicked it off. His mother's room was strangely plain, as if she had left all her quirky gadgets behind in Handler's Corners or was using them as the main part of the decor in the restaurant downstairs. There were two spare rooms, one of which Lucinda had clearly commandeered for she was in the process of stuffing various items of clothing into a bag when he peeked in, and the second was empty save for a single bed and some empty cardboard boxes. The walls had been painted red, though on the floor there were only bare boards, and with a heavy sense of guilt he realised this should have been his. He shut the door quickly and turned away. Ronnie's room was a complete mess; folders of paper that probably had something to do with homework were strewn across the desk and innumerable copies of _Motoring Weekly_ littered the carpet. The room itself was tiny, little more than a closet space really, and had no windows so the only light came from one of the many soft LED strips she had installed into the join where walls met ceiling. But across from the bed, pushed to conserve space right up against the wall, was another door. This one was open, and a chill breeze blew through it into the room. Vert stepped through and climbed up the metal staircase it revealed; it made sense that Ronnie would have taken command of the roof.

He found Tezz there, standing only a few paces away from the door and staring without seeing down to a small circle of deck chairs laid out around the remains of an open fire. Yes, this was Ronnie's domain, and he felt like he was intruding without permission just by being there.

Tezz half-turned, alerted to his presence by the shifting of gravel beneath his feet.

"Have they found anything downstairs?" he asked. His voice was just as deep and neutral as it always was, but in the dusk light Vert could plainly see the red stain in his eyes.

"Stanford found something in the living room; Sage is analysing it now."

Tezz nodded and said nothing. The scanner in his own hand was beeping softly, but he paid it no mind.

"Back at the Hub you promised me we'd find them," Vert said, stepping forward to stand beside him. "How can you be so sure?"

"I cannot," the Russian countered. "I told you that because I want to believe it myself."

Vert's head snapped up as he looked at his friend properly. Tezz turned to meet him.

"Vert, whether you like it or not, your sister means a lot to me. While we still know so little about the circumstances of her disappearance, I refuse to accept that she cannot be found."

And with that he turned and slipped through the door back into the house, leaving Vert alone on the roof.

_The fire had been painful to look at for the first half an hour or so, but Tezz had gotten used to it once the sun had completely set and they had been out there for some time. He understood now why Ronnie was always so mesmerised when she looked into its flames. She sighed and shifted her weight beneath his arm._

_There were seven of them around that fire; himself, Ronnie, Lucinda, and four others he had only met that afternoon: Elliot, Tobin, India and Kathleen, their names were. They were smoking something he had a feeling probably wasn't legal, and cans of beer empty and full littered the ground haphazardly between them. These were her friends. They did this all the time, and Tezz was the outsider. He had gotten used to that feeling too over the months he had spent visiting her._

_They talked about things he didn't understand, about things he did understand and could tell they didn't, and about people he didn't know and was fairly sure most of them didn't either. As the night wore on the four friends got steadily higher and Lucinda got steadily more drunk, until at about three thirty in the morning they had all drifted into sleep with varying degrees of peace. Ronnie moved closer to him, and he let his eyes close. He was tired too, but he was also fantastically happy. He could have stayed there forever._

_"It gets cold up here when the fire dies out," she whispered. "Shall we go back downstairs?"_

_And he smiled, and let her pull him up and lead him through the door into the satisfying warmth of the house._

The image flooded back to Tezz of the last time he had been on that roof. It had been but a few weeks previously, in the awkward transition period between summer and autumn that is deceptively warm until the sun goes down. He couldn't have prevented the tears from falling even if he had tried, and he wondered how much Vert had noticed. He also wondered what had made him go straight to the roof. Obviously she wasn't hiding up there; the Wheeler family's collective disappearance was too complex for that to be the case. He should be downstairs helping the team search. He was by far the most qualified out of everyone present to find anything, after all. But he couldn't bring himself to face the house, not yet. He had too many emotional memories of the place, in the majority of which Ronnie featured, to scrutinise it with so many of his friends around. If he was alone...

He had to pull himself together. He wasn't alone, yet the fact still remained that she was missing and he could be seriously hindering the team's efforts to locate her. Moping around was not going to do anything to help, and he was fully aware of it.

Squaring his shoulders and wiping his eyes on his sleeve, he stepped out of Ronnie's bedroom and shut the door with a resolute click behind him.

"Have you found anything?" he asked the team below before he had even reached the halfway point on the stairs.

"Well, yes and no," Stanford hedged, walking into the arm of the sofa as he peered at his scanner. He didn't see the glower that crossed Tezz's face, so Sherman took over.

"Yes because we have found something," he explained quickly, "No because neither Sage nor Tromp know what it is. Some kind of particle formation is in the air, undetectable to most conventional human scanning methods. They're running it through the computers now."

"It would be most beneficial if we could obtain similar scans of the uppermost level," Tromp's reedy voice emerged from the holographic projector standing in the middle of the living room. "If two of the subjects were removed from there, these particles should be in greater abundance."

Tezz nodded to himself and ran back up the stairs, opening his own scanner as he did so. Tromp was right about one thing; the particles, whatever they were, certainly originated in the exact places the Wheelers had been when they disappeared.

"The particles seem to be focused on an epicentre and have spread outwards from there," he mused aloud, "As if they were originally only in one place and over time have diffused into the air." Which would suggest that if they had got there quicker, they would be getting stronger readings. Tezz skimmed through Jeremy's room, paying particular attention to his desk chair; it seemed to be teeming with the stuff; before moving back into Ronnie's. Curiously, the highest concentration wasn't around her bed, as he expected it to be if she had gone to sleep early to prepare for a pre-dawn ride. Instead, his readings were telling him that the epicentre was about a foot in front of the bed, as if she had been standing in front of it when she was taken...

"She knew," he blurted to the empty room as his thoughts raced on.

"Who knew what?" At least two people echoed the question through the com system.

"I think..." Tezz coughed. "My theory is that Ronnie knew what was happening when she was taken."

"How can you be certain?" Sage asked. "We do not yet know what these particles are."

"I am not certain. It is one possible theory."

"She would have been in bed, yeah," Lucinda whispered. Tezz jumped; he hadn't heard her come in, and already she was standing over his shoulder reading the scanner's screen. "Either she was on her way, or she got out in a hurry. I mean, I know nothing about particle physics, but doesn't that spread look like there was some kind of force behind it?"

Tezz frowned down at the screen, and realised with a jolt that Lucinda was right; there was a greater concentration of particles on the left, now displaced further by the fact that he was standing in it, but still spreading outwards in a semi-circle - the classic pattern of continued momentum. She had been moving, and moving fast, when this had taken place.

"I get the feeling she wasn't just running for the bathroom," Lucinda muttered.

"Sage, analysis?"

"I agree that the displacement pattern suggests Ronnie was moving, and this actually tells us a great deal about the type of particle and machine that was used. I am afraid, however, that we have all the information we can gather from your location. Now the particles must be analysed in further detail from here."

Well, at least they were making progress.

"Alright team, if we've got everything we should head back. I want this stuff analysed as quickly as possible."

Tezz understood and shared Vert's anxiety, and looked up to see his leader softly close the door to the outdoor staircase behind him as he entered.

"Lucinda you should stay here..." Vert carried on. The sour expression on the biker girl's face cut him off mid-sentence.

"Hell no, I'm coming back with you. There's no way I'm hanging around at home while you guys know everything before me."

"Alright, alright," Vert muttered, heading down the stairs to the restaurant floor. "Is everyone okay for the drive back?"

There were murmurs of confirmation from the whole team, and they headed out the front door to where they had left their cars on the side of the road. The sun had fully set and cast the street into darkness, permeated only by the orange hum of the street lights. Stanford, enjoying the fact that he was for once being useful, continued to scan the lower floor as they left, and ended up tripping over the leg of a chair and falling head first into the umbrella pot that had claimed so many in similar ways before. Tezz snickered, and didn't help him out.

_Ronnie laughed as she flipped the sign on the front door around to "open" and moved the umbrella pot three inches to the left. No one would use it today; the sun was shining as if it didn't know the meaning of rainfall; and Tezz had no idea why she didn't put it away during the summer since customers were always tripping over it when they came in. Maybe she liked that - it was her kind of humour. He too grinned, knowing that it was perfectly okay to laugh at one's own joke if someone else had done so first._

_She pursed her lips guiltily in time with the bang caused when the staircase door was opened with little enough attention to cause it to hit the wall, and moments later Lucinda's voice reached him, groggy and thick with sleep and the hangover she would inevitably have from the amount she had drunk the night before._

_"How the heck are you two so chirpy?" she complained, staggering through to the kitchen with one hand plastered to her temple. "I can't even see right."_

_"Some of us can handle our liquor Luce," Ronnie chided, and shot a wink at Tezz; neither of them had drunk anything stronger than diet Pepsi up on the roof. "And besides, what did I tell you about smoking and drinking at the same time?"_

_"Nothin your mom ain't told me before," Lucinda grumbled. "And keep it down will you? You have no idea what hangover headaches are like."_

_"Nope, and I take pride in that. Now get out of here and go shower; you look like crap and we're open."_

_"You're kidding. It's not half ten already?"_

_"Mmhmm. Scram. Oh, are the others up yet?"_

_"Nah, they'll be dead to the world for hours." And Lucinda trudged back up the stairs, a glass of water and some aspirin in her grasp. Ronnie shut the door after her._

_"Sometimes I worry about that girl," she sighed, sliding under Tezz's arm._

_"I don't," he said dismissively. Lucinda Demourney could look after herself._

_"You know, I think that's the first time I've heard you use a contraction." She looked up at him in sarcastic amazement. He smiled and kissed her._

_"I will try not to make a habit of it."_

_She smirked, and pulled away from him just as a middle-aged man and wife wearing matching red pullovers strolled in. They both immediately tripped over the umbrella pot in the corner by the door._

As Tezz drifted back into consciousness he was acutely aware of the tears streaming down his face. Sitting up in bed he wiped them away, and glanced at the glowing red digits of the clock as he reached for a tissue. Four nineteen. Great.

It had only been two and a half hours since they'd returned from the city. Too early for him to get up and do something without somebody asking questions.

That was the second time now he had woken up crying. The first had been after he and Ronnie had fought - over what he couldn't even remember - but he had instantly forgotten his dreams at the time. It had felt strange then, but this time he just felt lost. As if he didn't know what to do without her.

No, he knew exactly what to do: he had to go and help the others track her down.

He swung out of bed and threw on his clothes, paying no attention to the fact that his jumper was the wrong way around as he made his way through the Hub's empty, silent corridors. The soft blue glow that met him from the central command centre told him that the computers were still in use, and he wasn't surprised to meet Tromp there at this time of the morning; for all he knew, the Kharamanos didn't even need to sleep. It looked like it was just the two of them, and that was fine. It meant he wouldn't have to make small talk.

Wordlessly he brought up a new screen and skim-read the reams of text, line upon line telling him every possible option of what the particles they had found that evening weren't. As the computer identified each element, it ruled out yet another combination and added sometimes as many as ten new classifications to its Not Applicable list. Eventually, hopefully, it would rule out everything within its data banks and be left with just one, but nobody had any idea how long that would take.

"It would seem that these Sentient computer systems are having difficulty in assimilating the added information from my data storage unit," Tromp murmured from across the room. Tezz frowned; the Hub's computer had the processing power to download information ad infinitum, deliberately so in order to accommodate any new Sentient Data Logs they found lying around Battle Zones. He crossed to Tromp's station and watched the exact same stream of text progress with dogged determination in front of him, but interrupted with the occasional jerking flicker; every now and again the entire display went blank. That shouldn't be happening.

"That looks bad," a voice chimed behind him, and Tezz whirled to see Lucinda saunter across the Hub, a half-chewed apple in one hand. She had taken her black leather jacket off to reveal a t-shirt of a surprisingly pink hue adorned with a cartoon picture of rainbows and rather babyish smiling horses. She noticed him staring and grinned.

"What? A biker girl can't like My Little Pony too?"

Tezz shrugged, offering no judgement. He returned to Tromp, whose expression was fixed on the screen as text flew past him at an ever-increasing rate. He wondered if the Kharamanos could read that fast, or if he was actually absorbing the information in a different way. He would have to ask him about it...

The screen suddenly froze, the holographic words quivering in front of them, before the console turned a violent shade of orange and letters unfamiliar to him materialised one after the other. They seemed to reach out to him, like in 3D movies, and project themselves across the entire Hub space. But Tezz knew that their computer systems were incapable of doing that. His peripheral vision darkened and he whirled to see that the rest of the Hub - not just computers but everything, down to the lighting panels in the ceiling - was emanating the same orange glow. The core unit burned ochre, and the throbbing hum increased to an incessant whine as the light intensified. Tezz winced and tried to block out the noise, but no matter how hard he crammed his hands down on his ears it made no difference. Finally, with a bang and shower of sparks, the power units gave out and cast the entire Hub into pitch black.

The silence that followed was claustrophobic, until it too was broken by the thin, electric voice of Tromp coming from somewhere down and to his left.

"Stop looking," he commanded, his voice possessing a distant quality as if he were in some kind of trance. "You will never find us."

A loud clang suggested that Tromp had fallen over onto the metal flooring, and the Hub was plunged into oppressive silence once again.

**Thanks for visiting, please leave a review in the box on your way out. ~ E.C. xx**


	3. Chapter 3

Vert woke with a start to the sound of a loud popping fizz, and immediately knew that something was wrong. He reached for the light switch, wasn't surprised when he flipped it and nothing happened, and instead stumbled across the room to the dresser he knew would have a flashlight in it somewhere. With this in hand he crossed the room again and pushed open his bedroom door. It offered little resistance, which informed him that the Hub's whole power grid had gone offline – every door in the building was on an electric hinge system that was a pain in the neck to try and open by hand. Across the hall another flashlight beam met him, and he was faced with a bleary-eyed and messy-haired Zoom.

"Dude, what happened?"

"I don't know, it woke me up too. Come on."

Vert led the way through the corridors that seemed even longer in the dark, but perhaps they were just moving slowly in their fear of what might await them. In Vert's mind this fear was justified; the Hub was never this dark. Before now, he hadn't thought it was capable of being this dark. The emergency lighting should have come on in the event of a power failure, but even one of those was unlikely – it wasn't like they got their electricity from the National Grid or something. He followed his memory to the Hub's central room, and froze when he heard voices. Zoom carried on and walked into his back.

"...are unlikely to get lost if you don't move anywhere," came Tezz's voice, rather wearily, through the blackness.

"Seriously, where are you? I'm about to panic," Lucinda squeaked.

"For someone who wears black leather with such consistency as you, I would not have assumed you were afraid of the dark."

"If you tell anyone I swear I will cut your tongue out," she threatened, and Vert smiled to himself at the image her words conjured. He clicked his flashlight onto a higher setting and shone it further into the room, where its beam picked up Tezz crouched in front of the main computer console. The Russian squinted and held his hand up against the glare, and Lucinda audibly sighed in relief.

"Vert? Please be you."

"It's me," he confirmed, and made his way towards them.

"Oh, good. I thought you might be some freaky alien thing trying to kill us."

Vert frowned. "Why would I be something trying to kill you?"

"Well, Tezz thinks this power cut is sabotage, but I don't really know what's going on anymore."

"Luce, calm down," Zoom instructed, pressing his own flashlight into her hand. The beam danced around the Hub wildly, moving from corner to corner as if searching for something before finally settling down. Vert left them and knelt down beside Tezz.

"What happened?"

"We were issued with a warning," he replied, not looking Vert in the face but instead concentrating on removing a series of wires from Tromp's midsection. "My theory is that the force that took your family is aware of our attempts to trace them, and have attacked our power unit in order to prevent us from doing so. Tromp was connected to the core at the time the virus was implemented; I am uncertain how it has affected him."

New fear suddenly gripped Vert. "Zoom, check on Sage," he instructed. If she had been recharging when this happened, if she had been connected to the Mobi...

"I am unharmed," her clear voice pierced the darkness, and Vert looked up relieved to see her luminous form rising into the Hub. As she spoke she began to cast orbs of soft blue light into the air. "Although, I did experience a strange disorientation at first."

"Do you know what happened?"

"I believe so," she confirmed, but the way she said it made Vert's heart sink. "I recommend that you rouse the rest of the Battle Force Five and prepare yourselves for a long, hazardous mission."

Vert cast a glance at Tezz, who returned the gesture before standing up.

"Will our vehicles function if the Hub is offline?"

"The only way to be certain is to try," Sage directed. Vert crossed the Hub to the Sabre and screwed his fingers together behind his back, hoping that it would respond. As he pressed the power key, the display screen briefly flickered into life...

And then died. He tried again to the same result, and the third time not even the brief flicker graced him with its presence.

"Anything?" he called across to Tezz.

"Negative. It would appear that whatever entity we are dealing with also drained the power supplies from our vehicles."

"So our first priority is getting Hub power back online," Vert reasoned.

"I will begin preliminary investigations into the damage caused immediately."

"Good. In the meantime, Zoom and Lucinda wake the others and get lights up in the hallways we're going to use in the next few hours. Sage, you'll need to fill us all in on what you know, and then it's all hands to the pump to get this place up and running again."

He pushed away from the Sabre and followed Zoom back to his room to don his shock suit. They would need to be ready for anything at a moment's notice; the longer they spent putting themselves back together, the less chance he knew they had of finding his family.

Legs dangling off the edge of the table she had claimed to sit on, Lucinda listened to Sage as she narrated an explanation of who she thought to be responsible for the Wheeler family's kidnapping, and why they were an extremely dangerous adversary. She stressed on more than one occasion that everything she was saying was pure guesswork, which only succeeded in confirming, to Lucinda at least, that she was almost certain of what she was telling them.

As Sage talked, Lucinda watched the Battle Force Five. Most of them stood in a circle around their Sentient friend, listening with varying degrees of understanding and intent. Stanford, it amused her, was more interested in the lay of his hairstyle than in what Sage had to say, and Agura threw him no fewer than five irritated glances throughout the course of the discussion. Sitting beside her on the table Zoom kept glancing at her and sending her reassuring smiles, and the Cortez brothers frequently whispered to each other for clarification or private discussion on Sage's point. She could tell that AJ didn't really know what was going on; he kept scratching the inside of his ear and staring up at the glowing blue light orbs distractedly; but Vert was hanging on her every word as if the fate of the world depended on it. To be fair, she realised, the fate of _his_ world really was depending on everything she said. Only Tezz was outside of the little circle, opting instead to lie on the floor and rummage around beneath the central computer console with the alien version of a spanner and investigate the state of the electrics while she talked. Lucinda couldn't see his face, but she could hear the occasional inputs he voiced. And he still didn't sound at all upset. She kicked at the air harder at the thought.

"They are called the Pathgral," Sage informed them. "The Sentients encountered them eons before the first war between Reds and Blues began when they kidnapped several members of our race in a similar manner, leaving behind only these strange particles in the air. It was decided after a long series of skirmish attacks that war between our species would only result in the annihilation of both parties, and as such our people were returned and the Pathgral never seen or heard from again. This is ancient knowledge that nobody has needed to consider for countless centuries, which is perhaps why I did not realise the possibility earlier."

"What makes you so sure that it's them?" Vert demanded.

"I am not. I am simply postulating a theory based on their preferred methods of attack, and the fact that their symbolic colour appears to be orange. They once shut down the Red Sentient home world's power core in much the same way they have shut down yours."

"What interest could they have with humans?" AJ asked, "and why Vert's family?"

"That I do not know," Sage admitted, "although it could be the case that they have identified residual signs of travelling through the Multiverse on Ronnie and sought to confirm why humans have been utilising Sentient transport technology. If they discover the current vulnerability of my people, I am certain that they will seek to destroy both the Red and Blue home planets."

"If they're after traces of Sentient technology, why Ronnie and not us?" Agura frowned.

"Because the Hub is most likely shielded from their view," Sage clarified. "When I constructed the base I installed complex cloaking devices that masked the advanced technology from outside scanners, specifically designed so that no human government or military would discover it. There is a likelihood that my shielding has proven similarly affective at deflecting the Pathgral."

"I hate to be the one to ask," Lucinda piped up, "But what happened to the people they kidnapped? I mean, what did they do to them?"

Sage considered the question for a long time. Too long, really. When she did speak it was with great sadness in her voice.

"I do not know. The Sentients the Pathgral took were returned to us as empty shells."

In the silence that followed, Lucinda had time to seriously regret asking that question.

"I believe I have discovered the source of our power failure," Tezz called to the group once he had decided that the silence had become awkward enough. Lucinda fumed quietly.

"Report, Tezz," Vert ordered. Tezz pushed himself out from underneath the console and wiped his hands on the leg of his shock suit.

"A simple overload in the system," he declared, "although it suggests that the Pathgral, if they are the culprits, have an enormous power to be able to achieve this with our computers."

"So... so you're saying that all they've done is the Sentient equivalent of blowing the fuses?" Spinner couldn't quite wrap his head around the idea.

"Affirmative. Unfortunately the method of repairing their damage is significantly more complicated than replacing some wires."

"Can you do it?" Vert demanded.

"I can, but it will take time and I will require assistance."

Sherman and Spinner looked at each other again and nodded, while Sage seemed to glow brighter. "We shall begin immediately," she announced, and Tezz gave an accepting shrug before sliding back underneath the console.

Lucinda sighed and stretched; the whole conversation, added to the fact that she hadn't slept in two days, was taking its toll on her brain. Zoom glanced at her again.

"I don't suppose there's any way of getting to these Pathgral people, is there?"

"Probably not," he confirmed. "Definitely not without power; our rides don't work either."

"Mine does," she muttered, briefly allowing herself to feel smug at the fact that once again, simple engineering had outsmarted advanced technology. Beside her, Zoom grew quiet and still as he thought.

"Hey, Sage" he called after a moment. "I guess it would be too convenient for us to have a Battle Key to the Pathgral homeworld, wouldn't it?"

"None was ever made, but I do know the location of a Quantum Flux Tear, similar to the one connecting Earth to the Red Sentient home world, that exists in a distant Battle Zone. However, it has not been required for use in several million years, and this knowledge is useless without a functioning vehicle."

"We got one."

Vert, who had caught the tail end of their discussion, frowned and crossed the console room to their table. "What's your plan, Zoom?"

"Well, I was thinking that since Luce's bike is still working, I could take it through and scout out the area..."

"No," Vert cut in. "We have no idea what's on the other side of that thing."

"Yeah, exactly, so we need intel. And I'm the scout, I know how to not be seen."

"As reluctant as I am to endorse any member of this team risking their lives," Sage's voice was quiet as she turned to Vert, "The Pathgral are unlikely to detect technology so primitive."

"Thanks," Lucinda muttered.

The whole Hub seemed to go quiet while Vert considered the plan. He set his jaw in that defiant square, and Lucinda was afraid he would say no.

"I don't like this," he said slowly after the longest time. "But alright. You know what you're doing, Zoom. You have thirty minutes before we come to get you."

"Is that okay with you?" Zoom glanced at Lucinda, the look in his eye suggesting he already knew she would let him go. She hated to disappoint him.

"I'm gonna be a pain in the ass and say no, it's not." She held up a hand to stop Vert's objection before carrying on. "Look, call it basest sentimentality or whatever you like, I have never let anyone else ride that bike, and I'm not about to start now. If it goes, I go too. That's the deal."

"What? No," Zoom protested, leaping off the table. Wearily, she uncrossed her legs and stood.

"Zoom's right, Lucinda," Vert stated. "You don't have the expertise to go into a Battle Zone on this kind of mission, even if you're not going alone."

"I'm not four years old, you know," she argued. "And trust me, that bike is more complicated than it looks." Zoom raised an eyebrow at her. "It has quirks," she clarified, "that make it tricky to ride fresh out, okay. Think about it, if it's your only ride, don't you want its most experienced rider at the bars?"

"You're not going to back down on this, are you?" Vert asked.

"Nope."

"Okay. Fine."

"Vert, hang on..."

"No, Zoom, she's right, you need her to do this. Your mission is to scout out the area, find as much as you can and report it back. If you see where they're keeping my family do not engage unless you think it absolutely necessary; we still have the element of surprise and we are going to need it if we stand a chance at all."

"Right."

"You have thirty minutes from when you cross that portal."

"It would be advisable to remove all Sentient technology from your person," Sage suggested, "which unfortunately also includes your communicator. I am uncertain how sensitive the Pathgral are at detecting it."

"Better not to take chances, I guess," Zoom muttered. "I'll go change."

There was no joy in his voice or body as he strode through the dim blue lights and out the other side of the Hub. Lucinda didn't want to discuss the issue further; she had a guilty thought that she'd just aged Zoom by several years; but Vert turned to her regardless.

"Are you sure you want to do this?"

"I want to do something, and you'll notice that I'm not exactly a vital necessity in the repair shop. I'm good at riding my bike, so let me ride it." She forced her glare to soften before adding, "Please."

Vert nodded grimly. He turned away from her and stared absently across the Hub to where the rest of his team were gathered around Tezz and Spinner, still on their backs underneath the console. The two of them were deep in technical discussion about their task, and every so often one or the other would throw out a request for some tool, or for one of the team to stand back out of the meagre light. It was all working out like clockwork, as the best teams always did.

"My mom and Jeremy," Vert suddenly began. "They have no idea about any of this, do they?"

Lucinda shook her head. "You asked Ronnie never to tell them, so she never told them.

He nodded absently, his mind somewhere else entirely. "I never wanted it to come to this," he confessed.

"I know," she assured him. "But it has, so you're going to have to work out what to do about it."

"You can be just a little too blunt sometimes."

"Practical with a capital P," she shrugged.

Zoom strode back through the weak haze towards them, now wearing his civilian clothes, and Lucinda zipped up her jacket.

"Are you ready?"

"Let's get this done."

Sage handed Zoom a dark olive green and electric blue Battle Key.

"You will have to find somewhere to hide this when you reach the Battle Zone; the Pathgral will certainly be able to detect it."

Zoom nodded but said nothing. Vert gave Sage one last meaningful look before leading them through another door in the main control room, a glowing orb in one hand, and through several twists of corridor before finally reaching a stairwell.

"I never thought we'd use this," he muttered, and shoved the door aside.

On the surface of Handler Corners the sun had already risen high above the cliff line, and all three of them squinted out across the desert from the door of the old garage. Lucinda mounted up; her helmet was cold when she slipped it on.

"Good luck," Vert wished. She knew she couldn't summon a convincing grin in return, so she didn't try. As soon as Zoom had settled comfortably on the seat behind her she throttled the engine, allowed the air around them to fill up with gas fumes, and then kicked off the brake.

Vert watched them speed through the dust, and kept watching long after the blue light in the distance had swallowed them away. He wondered if he had made the right decision in letting them go, and what would happen, not just to them but to everyone on the planet, if they failed.

**A/N**

**Hey everyone, thanks for keeping up with me so far and thank you to everyone who reviewed the last two chapters. So I've kind of cheated and made up a whole new species, but hey, I own nothing so by some twisted logic I can do what I like with it. Please leave a review on the way out, even if it's just to complain at me for something. I like complaints. They're funny. That's all for now, hopefully I'll have chapter four for you soon. ~E.C. xx**


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